John Kasich, Republican

‘Multi-tasker’ doesn’t lack in confidence

By Joe Hallett, The Columbus Dispatch

(MCT) — Riding shotgun in his campaign’s Ford Expedition, John Kasich had heard the $8 billion question one too many times. He was weary of the ceaseless inquiries about what programs and services he would cut or eliminate to fill the projected massive hole in the next two-year state budget. Somewhere on I-71 between Cincinnati and Columbus, Kasich locked eyes with a reporter in the back seat and said, “Do me a favor. When this is over, if I should win, would you please get rid of the doomsday scenario and let me have a try, at least let me have a frickin’ try?”

Nowhere in that statement or any other did Kasich specify how he would deal with the budget. Beyond his pledge not to raise taxes, both he and his Democratic rival, Gov. Ted Strickland, have avoided details when asked the $8 billion question. But Kasich’s simple plea was voluminous, chock full of insights into the persona of the Republican who would be Ohio’s 69th governor.

Passionate, combative, optimistic, self-assured — Kasich’s statement illuminated those personal traits. Not for a moment does he doubt his ability to lift Ohio from its funk, to bring jobs back to a state that has stumbled and bumbled from one recession to another, from one budget crisis to the next, never seeming quite sure how it should look as it contemplates the crow’s feet on its post-industrial facade. Kasich continually points out that he will deal with Ohio’s budget problems the same way he tackled the federal deficit in 1997 as chairman of the House Budget Committee.

He succeeded, he says, by having the guts to curb spending and the fair-mindedness to compromise with Democratic President Bill Clinton. “We made things happen because we took the bull by the horns and we did things that changed the direction of the government. … The worst thing would be to miss an opportunity to do great things and I’ve never, never operated that way.” Kasich is not one to mope about the past. He said, in fact, that during his 58 years, including 18 in Congress, a failed presidential bid, nine years in investment banking and television, a divorce before his current 13-year marriage, and 10 years of fatherhood, there is “nothing” in his life that he regrets.

“I’m not a person that looks backwards. You do the best you can. … The best way to live: Take care of today, and so I don’t look back and say, ‘Oh, I wish I had done this.’” Kasich is a whirling dervish — “Red Bull style,” as one editorial put it — and a Gatling gun of ideas with a little boy’s fidgetiness for the details. “I’m not a widget-maker or a dial-turner,” he said, proudly proclaiming his ability as a “multi-tasker.”

Whereas former Republican Gov. George V. Voinovich obsessed about the need to “get in the bowels of state government,” that’s not a place where Kasich plans to dwell. But, he is asked, isn’t good policy wrought by getting the details right and, as governor, shouldn’t he be involved in the sausage-making?

He will have “very smart people around” to take care of that, Kasich assures. “I don’t get down like Jimmy Carter did in planning all the details. I will have to sign off on them and they will be reasonable to me, or we’ll go back and do them again. But I’m on to the next things.” If nothing else, Kasich’s state of perpetual motion makes life interesting for anyone around him. “He’s on, 100 percent of the time, and I have the ability to be the calming force, the reasonable force, to say, ‘Let’s step back and look at things,’” said his wife, Karen. “He gets me energized and excited about things that I wouldn’t have ever thought I’d be excited about. He gets me thinking in different directions.”

John’s marriage to Karen in 1997 preceded his short-lived run for the GOP presidential nomination in 2000, the year before he left Congress and launched a multipronged career in banking, television and public speaking, making him rich and, he says, providing real-world experience to prepare him to be Ohio’s chief executive. Growing up the son of a mailman in the rusting Pittsburgh suburb of McKees Rocks, Kasich is imbued with his hometown’s grittiness and a pain-in-the-neck resolve to achieve by “wearing people down to get what you want,” he once told a college audience. He did that as a freshman in 1970 at Ohio State University when he went to the office of then-President Novice G. Fawcett to complain about a dorm policy. Plopping down in a chair, Kasich told Fawcett’s secretary that she would be retired before he went away. Kasich learned in his meeting that Fawcett would be visiting President Richard M. Nixon the next day at the White House. Fawcett agreed to deliver a note from Kasich to Nixon, who was so taken with the OSU freshman’s critique of his presidency that he invited him to the Oval Office on Dec. 20, 1970. The Nixon meeting was a precursor to Kasich’s career-long penchant for barging through to take center stage with some of the world’s most famous people.

From his adopted hometown of Westerville, he continually defied odds, winning an Ohio Senate seat at age 26 and going to Congress at 30. When Kasich left Congress at the start of 2001, he wanted a television show and a job on Wall Street and got them by wooing the top guys — Fox News President Roger Ailes and former Lehman Brothers CEO Richard S. Fuld. Kasich grew up in a Democratic and Catholic family, but he later changed both his party and religion. The death of both parents at the hands of a drunken driver in 1987 transformed Kasich’s life, starting him on “a journey to discover God and rediscover myself,” he told The Dispatch in 1999. But there are stories that Kasich is not always a nice guy when he mingles with everyday people, and anecdotes about his arrogance, rudeness and belittling behavior have appeared in the media. James D. Schrim III, a Worthington businessman and a Republican, describes hearing Kasich speak at an event late last year and being turned off because he looked “like he had just fallen out of a washing machine” and was dismissive of questions. “After he left the room, I couldn’t get over the hubris, the arrogance, the tone,” Schrim later wrote in an e-mail to friends, noting that Kasich also never responded to Schrim’s offer to help the campaign. Added another person who has worked with Kasich but asked not to be identified: “There is a meanness to John, and I think that actually comes across.” Kasich replies, “Do you believe everything you read in the paper? I don’t. … If you don’t treat people the way you want them to treat you, it comes back, maybe on your kids.” Donald G. Thibaut, Kasich’s former congressional chief of staff and a close friends, also disputed such assertions: “There is not a mean bone in his body. He is a devoted father to his children; he is a devout Christian, and he lives that life.” Thibaut recounted numerous instances — Kasich declines to discuss them — in which Kasich has helped those in need, including helping an impoverished woman get a life-saving bone-marrow transplant. Kasich says his run for governor is a selfless endeavor and, with characteristic self-assuredness, says he will happily retreat to private life once he has fixed Ohio.

Ted Strickland, Democrat

‘Honest, good guy’ can play hardball

By Mark Niquette, The Columbus Dispatch

(MCT) — Ted Strickland took the stage at the Scioto County fairgrounds, stood in front of a huge “Southern Ohio’s Own” banner and scanned the adoring crowd. The governor was home. “I see Cookie (Green) out there,” Strickland said at the annual event last month to mark his birthday. “Cookie was a girl I was sweet on. I used to ride down the road with my brother-in-law, Bob Hurst, and we would pass Cookie’s house and he would say, ‘Lookie, Lookie, Lookie, I see Cookie.’” Green smiled and waved as the crowd roared. She and Strickland dated during their senior year in high school, until he went off to Asbury College in Kentucky in 1959.

All these years later, on this glorious fall day, she smiled again when asked what kind of governor she thinks her former beau has been. “He’s been just like he’s been since the fifth grade — an honest, good guy,” said Green, who still lives on Duck Run where she and Strickland, born only days apart 69 years ago, grew up. In fact, ask the friends and family of Ohio’s 68th governor, and almost to a person they’ll tell you that reaching the top elected office in the state hasn’t changed Ted Strickland. “He’s just Ted,” said David Miller, a pediatric surgeon in Florida who was Strickland’s best man at his wedding.

“You’ll never find anyone more honest and caring and willing to give his all.” Yet, locked in a sometimes-bitter re-election campaign this fall with Republican John Kasich, Strickland has belied that good-guy image by running what one newspaper criticized as “a relentlessly negative campaign,” berating Kasich at every turn as a creature of Wall Street. Strickland doesn’t apologize for his campaign, saying he’s been factual and is convinced that Kasich would be bad for Ohio.

He doesn’t even count the race this year as his most difficult, compared with races for Congress he won narrowly in 1992, lost in 1994 and won again in 1996 in a mostly Republican district. “Some people think that Ted Strickland’s too nice to fight the fight that needs to be fought to hold onto the governor’s office,” Strickland told the crowd in Lucasville.

“I try to be nice, but you can’t grow up on Duck Run with four brothers and four sisters and not know how to fight.” Strickland’s personal story is well-documented by now: He grew up as the second-youngest of nine children in rural Scioto County, the son of a steelworker and staunchly Democratic father and homemaker mother.

The family even lived in a chicken shack for a while after a fire at the house. He has a divinity degree and a doctorate in psychology and worked as a Methodist minister and licensed psychologist around losing runs for Congress in 1976, 1978 and 1980. After finally winning in 1992, Strickland served six terms in Congress and easily defeated Republican J. Kenneth Blackwell for governor in 2006, in an election cycle dominated by Democrats after a series of GOP scandals. Then the recession hit.

State revenue plummeted and Ohio lost nearly 400,000 jobs, giving Republicans the advantage this year. While Strickland says he would have liked having more resources, he doesn’t complain. “I think of my predecessor, Bob Taft, a good and decent man,” Strickland said. “I think of the turmoil that he went through, which I think is hugely unfortunate.

So I’ve had some bumps in the road, but I think, by and large, my tenure as governor has not been as terribly stressful as it has been for people who perhaps have gone before me and maybe who will come after me.” His critics have questioned his leadership, especially a flip-flop on his opposition to expanded gambling last year. But Strickland flatly rejects such criticism, saying he avoided drastic cuts while dealing with hostile Senate Republicans and did the best he could to position the state for a recovery.

“I will compare my record to any other governor in America when it comes to dealing with the recession in a responsible manner,” he said. Strickland will tell you that his decision to ask fellow Democrat Marc Dann to step down as attorney general in May 2008 was one of the most difficult moments of his time in office because he “knew it was going to result in a lot of pain for a lot of people, and some very innocent people,” especially Dann’s children. Strickland’s wife, Frances, who met the future governor in the 1970s while they were graduate students at the University of Kentucky and married him in 1987, said her husband does not dwell on difficult decisions.

“The thing I like a lot about Ted is that he’s been able to make tough decisions and not look back, not wring his hands and second-guess himself,” she said. The job also hasn’t left him much time to spend with friends and family or even to attend the graduations of cherished great-nieces and great-nephews.

Betty Jenkins, his 82-year-old sister from Lucasville, who was part of her brother’s annual birthday event last month, said it was the first time she had seen him since last Christmas. Strickland did take the time to be with Miller and his oldest son when he was fighting cancer three years ago. Miller, who met Strickland in the 1960s and has been close to him ever since, said his children call Strickland “Uncle Ted” and that it meant a lot to have him there during that difficult time. If Strickland wins a second term, he has acknowledged that balancing the next budget will be “brutal” in the face of a potential $8 billion shortfall. But he says he’s driven to seek re-election both by a desire to see initiatives in education and other areas continue and by a concern that a “reckless” Kasich will take the state in the wrong direction. Quoting a friend, Strickland said, “Who do you want writing the next budget?” Still, Strickland acknowledges that he will be leaving the political stage, either this year after losing to Kasich or in four years if he prevails Nov. 2, because of term limits. Although the governor hasn’t made definitive plans about what he will do whenever he leaves office — he mentioned possible work related to education or psychology — he said he wants to “die working.” “I don’t know what I’ll do, but I do know that I won’t retire and fade into never-never land with a golf club or something,” he said. “You’re only on this earth for a relatively brief period of time, and I think you ought to try to stay busy and utilize whatever time you have doing things.” As proud as he is of his roots, there’s been a twinge of sadness associated with going home since the death of his parents, who didn’t get to see him elected governor. Strickland’s brother Roger says the governor takes after their mother — he called her “one the finest people I’ve ever known” — and that their father would have been pleased with his son’s tenure as governor “as long as Ted believed in organized labor and fair treatment of all the people in Ohio.” But on that stage in Lucasville last month, there was no talk of retirement. “I never forgot where I came from, my friends,” Strickland said. “If you’ve got an ounce of fight left in you, I’ve got a ton of fight left in me.”